Being a very girly girl and loving everything pink, my curiosity grew when this morning I read that ‘priory to 1940’s boys were associated with pink and girls associated with blue’. This began my thinking in to why we insist on colour coding our babies and where these gender colour preferences came from.
In the 1800’s children were dressed in white and both boys and girls alike wore dresses, differentiated only by buttons on either the front or back. As clothing shapes began to develop, more colours were introduced and worn by both genders, however, many mothers would dress their boys in pink outfits as men traditionally wore red to symbolise strength and manhood, so pink was the little boy version. The Virgin Mary was famously illustrated in a blue dress, leading to many baby girls dressed in blue as it symbolised femininity.
During WWII, homosexuals were made to wear a pink triangle on their uniform and so post-war, this colour was affectively ‘disowned’ by straight men and past over as a girl’s colour. As fashion developed after the war, men’s uniforms were often blue to symbolise trust and support and pink was pushed further as a women’s colour. ‘Think Pink’ was a marketing slogan to convince women of the 1940’s to embrace their femininity and so began the dressing of little girls in pink.
Interestingly, many studies have been done on innate gender colour preference and have revealed that regardless of what colour we are dressed in, females, even from different cultural backgrounds, will tend towards pink and red shades and boys will tend to prefer blue and green shades.
So if you are traditional at heart, then the ideal baby-grow to buy your friend’s baby is white, but have no fear if you have already purchased a bright pink ensemble – the little girl will love it!
